Insight Integration

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What is Insight?

(supported since Better Excel Exporter for Jira Cloud 0.7.0)

Insight is the leading asset management app for Jira, that allows implementing CMDB, CRM, HR, ITSM or ITIL functionality on the Jira platform.

Insight integration features

• You can export the Insight-managed custom field type Insight Objects to Excel.
• You can configure the export format to include object names (e.g. "My awesome server"), object keys (e.g. "My awesome server [SRVR-123]"), object attributes (e.g. "My awesome server [SRVR-123] (Manufacturer=Cray Research, Vector Processors=4, Type=Supercomputer)") and any combination of these.

(Need more features? Tell us in a support ticket!)

Insight integration vs. the Insight built-in Excel exports

You may want to ask: if Insight has a built-in Excel export feature, why would you use another app for the same?

While the Insight built-in Excel exports may be sufficient for basic use cases, the Better Excel Exporter integration is more powerful in, at least, these:

• It is extremely customizable.
  Instead of accepting the pre-defined export types in Insight, you can define your own types via Excel templates.
• It supports all the powerful Excel features.
  You can use Excel formulas and functions, custom calculations in Groovy (sorting, complex math, data integration, etc.), charts, pivot tables, pivot charts, Visual Basic macros, among others.
• It is integrated with all the popular Jira apps.
  You can freely combine Insight data and other apps' data in the same Excel file.
• It comes with powerful templates optimized for Insight.
  You can use those "as is", or customize them to your needs.
• It is well-documented with the customization guide, the Expression Reference Manual, the recipes, and such.

If at least one of these is important for you, give the app a try.

Tutorial video

Watch this short introductory video to see how fast you can export your Insight data to Excel! (Although the video below was captured in the app's Server version, the Cloud version is very similar.)

Insight Excel export samples

Configuration

Configuring the Insight custom fields

The Insight in Jira Service Management and Better PDF Exporter integration relies on the Jira REST API. After configuring the API access once (based on the guide below), Better Excel Exporter will automatically recognize the Insight-managed objects and export them accordingly.

Configuring REST API access for Insight in Jira Service Management

As this integration relies on the Jira REST API, you need to set your Jira email address and Jira API token for the REST API calls in the templates:

1. First create a Jira API token. Copy the API token to the clipboard, you'll need it later!
2. Click the cog icon "⚙" in the top right → Apps → Excel Templates (under Better Excel Exporter).
3. Open the field-helper-tool.groovy script for editing, and find this section:

   /* Insight in Jira Service Management authentication. */
   def insightUserEmail = '' // Jira Cloud user email address
   def insightApiToken = '' // Jira Cloud API token
   

4. At insightUserEmail add your Jira email address between the apostrophes (don't remove the apostrophes!).
5. At insightApiToken paste the Jira API token from the clipboard between the apostrophes (don't remove the apostrophes!).
6. Save the changes. (Don't worry about storing tokens here: this file is visible only for Jira administrators, who would have super-user permissions anyway.)

Configuring the export format for the Insight custom fields

The default behavior is that object names and object keys will be exported (e.g. "My awesome server [SRVR-123]"). You can include object name, object key and attributes by setting these configuration variables in the top part of the field-helper-tool.groovy script:

// field-helper-tool.groovy

/* Insight configuration. */
def insightObjectsWithNames = true
def insightObjectsWithKeys = true
def insightObjectsWithAttributes = false

If you want full control over the export format, please see this easy-to-read method in field-helper-tool.groovy:

private def insightObjectToString(def object)

Learn more about Insight

• Insight documentation
• Insight app page (on the Atlassian Marketplace)